Physically ingrained practices and routines are a subtle yet decisive precondition for perceiving, coherently grasping, and adequately responding to the more-than-human dynamics of a global environment in transition.

How has the Arctic region, a highly engineered and technically activated space, become a cold laboratory of the technosphere and its reach? This dossier looks at the multiple historical and current registers of contention over the future of a dramatically changing region.

borders are about drawing lines; they are complex organizational ecologies built on inbuilt and intentional forces.
For this dossier, we will explore the many direct and indirect technological means used to enforce rigid border structures.

This dossier looks at how these local particularities and relations resonate as écho-mondes that reflect back local dynamics, modulating technological usage in such a manner that the technologies themselves are irreversibly transformed

What is the fundamental idea behind the concept of the technosphere within its original context as an emergent component of the Earth system? What does it mean when technics create a system potent enough to intervene in and rival other geospheres?

infrastructure is both the epistemic and physical skeleton upon which the technosphere grows and proliferates. It provides the reasons behind how things are organized and makes such an organization possible in some sort of fixed capacity

the entire material world has been turned into a resource to be manipulated, consumed, or reordered. It is the industrialization of this relationship between humankind and all matter that has contributed decisively to creating the technosphere.

The Phosphorus Apparatus tells the story of that circulation ‒ by tracing a network of technical, earthly, and cultural mediations by following the dramaturgies of modern civilization through past, present, and future.

Risk equipment is the way in which we plan for contingency. From financial tools to scenario modeling to concrete landscaping, the planning apparatuses explored in this dossier attempt to stabilize the unstable through projecting information in anticipation of possible hazards

How do we approach, let alone understand, this shape-giving notion of a sphere embodying the technological condition of our planet? This dossier seeks to circumscribe and visualize the spatial forms and parameters now increasingly captured by the accidental megastructure of technics.

How is the technosphere not only inscribed into the surface of the Earth but also in individuals, and how does it determine and shape the behavior of collectives? What kinds of injuries and frictions result from the engineering of our environments – and ourselves – along a complex machinery of instruments, techniques, and simulations?

This dossier explores how technology influences the establishment of trust relationships in our sociotechnical world by negotiating the criteria we rely on to create trust in institutional structures, knowledge, and practices.

Babak Afrassiabi is an artist who works both in Iran and the Netherlands. Since 2004, he has collaborated with Nasrin Tabatabai on various joint projects and the publication of the bilingual magazine Pages (Farsi and English). Their work seeks to articulate the undecidable space between art and its historical conditions, including the recurring question of the place of the archive in defining the juncture between politics, history, and the practice of art. The artists’ work has been presented internationally in various solo and group exhibitions and they have been tutors at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2008–13), and Erg, école supérieure des arts, Brussels (2015–).

Dr. S. Ayesha Hameed is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures and the Joint Programme Leader in Fine Art and History of Art Research Fellow in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, London. She received her PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University, Canada in 2008

On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. He has been a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University since 2012. Prior to this, he was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows. In 2009, Barak received a joint PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University. His most recent book is On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013), and his current publication project, Coalonialism: Energy and Empire before the Age of Oil, is funded by a European Union Marie Curie Award and an Israel Science Foundation Grant.

Anil Bawa-Cavia is a computer scientist with a background in machine learning. He runs STDIO, a speculative software studio. His practice engages with algorithms, protocols, encodings, and other software artifacts and his doctoral research at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London was on complex networks in urbanism. He is a founding member of Call & Response, a sonic arts collective and gallery space in London, and a member of the New Centre for Research & Practice.

Axel Braun studied photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, and fine arts at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. His artistic research deals with controversial infrastructure projects, tautology as an attempt to understand reality, and failed utopias in art and architecture. Currently, he is pursuing the long-term project Towards an Understanding of Anthropocene Landscapes. Recently exhibited works include Some Kind of Opposition (2016) at Galeria Centralis, Budapest, and Dragonflies drift downstream on a river (2015) at Kunstmuseum Bochum.

Dr. Ele Carpenter is a senior lecturer in curating at Goldsmiths, London. Her curatorial practice responds to interdisciplinary socio-political contexts such as the nuclear economy and the relationship between craft and code.

Andrew Chubb is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia conducting research on the relationship between Chinese public opinion and government policy in the South China Sea. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary China, Pacific Affairs, East Asia Forum, and Information, Communication & Society. His blog, South Sea Conversations (southseaconversations.wordpress.com), provides translations and analysis of Chinese discourse on the South and East China Sea issues.

Louis Chude-Sokei is a writer and scholar currently teaching in the English Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. His academic interests range from West African, Caribbean, and American literary and cultural studies to a particular focus on sound, technology, and performance. His literary and public work focuses on immigration and black-on-black cultural contacts, conflicts, and exchanges. Chude-Sokei is the author of the award-winning book The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2006) and The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2016).

Claire Colebrook is a professor of English at Penn State University. Her areas of specialization are contemporary literature, visual culture, and theory and cultural studies. She has written articles on poetry, literary theory, queer theory, and contemporary culture. Colebrook is the co-editor of the series Critical Climate Change, published by Open Humanities Press, and a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Critical Climate Change. She recently completed two books on extinction for Open Humanities Press, Death of the PostHuman and Sex after Life (both 2014), and with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller co-authored Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (2016).

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and evolutionary biology. Since completing research on the sexual behavior and evolutionary ecology of small Trinidadian fish, his work has focused on the aesthetics of scientific representation, madness, and public parks, the design of t

Jonathan Donges is a postdoctoral researcher who holds a joint position at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (as Stordalen Scholar) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He studies planetary boundaries and social dynamics in the Earth system from a complex dynamical system perspective. At Potsdam, he is Co-head of the flagship COPAN (Coevolutionary Pathways) project (www.pik-potsdam.de/copan). His published research includes work on complex network theory, dynamical systems theory, and time series analysis, with a focus on their application to our understanding of past and present climate variability and its interactions with humankind on planet Earth.

David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and a professor of modern British history at King’s College London. After teaching at the University of Manchester, he became the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London (1993–2003), and moved along with the centre to King’s College London in August 2013. He is the author of many works, including The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2007), which argues for and exemplifies new ways of thinking about the material constitution of modernity.

stein is Arctic Program Director at the Wilderness Society an American land conservation non-profit. A licensed engineer, she has served on a number of federal advisory committees, including a National Academy of Sciences committee studying oil and gas regulations, and, for twelve years, a committee focusing on oil pipeline safety. Epstein holds a Master of Civil Engineering with a specialization in environme

Jennifer Gabrys is Reader in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, "Citizen Sense." Her publications include Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011); and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

Florian Goldmann is a Berlin-based artist and a PhD candidate at the DFG Research Training Center Visibility and Visualisation – Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge as well as at the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies, both Potsdam University. His research focus is the utilization of models as a means of both commemorating and predicting catastrophe. In 2015, he took part in the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) in Sendai, Japan. Goldmann is one of the founders of the research collective STRATAGRIDS and the author of Flexible Signposts to Coded Territories (2012), an analysis of football hooligan graffiti in Athens as a system of fluid signage.

Orit Halpern is a Strategic Hire in Interactive Design and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice. She is also a co-director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, Montreal, a laboratory situated at the intersection of art and life sciences, architecture and design, and computational media (www.speculativelife.com). Her recent monograph, Beautiful Data (2015), is a history of interactivity, data visualization, and ubiquitous computing. www.orithalpern.net

Carola Hein is a professor of the history of architecture and urban planning in the Architecture Department at Delft University of Technology. She has published widely on topics in contemporary and historical architectural and urban planning, notably that of Europe and Japan. Her current research interests include transmission of architectural and urban ideas along international networks, focusing specifically on port cities, and the global architecture of oil. Her books include Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (2011), Cities, Autonomy, and Decentralization in Japan (2006), and The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (2004).

Julian Henriques is the convener of the MA in Script Writing and Director of the Topology Research Unit in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Prior to this, he ran the film and television department at the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. His credits as a writer and director include the reggae musical feature film Babymother (1998) and as a sound artist, Knots & Donuts, exhibited at Tate Modern in 2011. Henriques researches street cultures and technologies and his publications include Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (1998), Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (2011), and Sonic Media (forthcoming).

Dr. Alexander Klose studied History, Law, Philosophy, Art, and Cultural Studies. From 2005-07 he held a scholarship at Bauhaus Universität Weimar for his PhD project on standardized containers used in transport as one of the leading material media in the 20th century.
Between 2009 and 2014 he worked as a research associate and programme developer at Kulturstiftung des Bundes. In 2015 in the forefront of COP 21, he co-curated Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge No. 18 – On Becoming Earthlings: 150 dialogues and exercises in shrinking and expanding the Human at Musée de l'Homme, Paris. His latest publication is: The Container Principle. How a box changes the way we think (2015).

Nicole Koltick is an assistant professor in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She is Founding Director of the Design Futures Lab at Westphal College, which is currently pursuing design research to stimulate debate on the potential implications of emerging technological and scientific developments within society. Koltick’s practice spans art, science, technology, design, and philosophy, and current work focuses on the philosophical, material, and relational implications of aesthetics as they intersect with emerging developments in computational creativity, artificially intelligent autonomous systems, robotics, and synthetic biological hybrids.

Matthijs Kouw joined the Rathenau Instituut, The Hague, in March 2016. He holds an MA in Philosophy and an MSc in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Amsterdam as well as a PhD from Maastricht University. In his PhD thesis, Kouw describes how and to what extent reliance on models can introduce vulnerabilities through the assumptions, uncertainties, and blind spots concomitant with modeling practice. He was employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), during which time he acted as a member of the Dutch delegation for plenary sessions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Lars Kulik studied biology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He received his doctorate on the development of social behavior of rhesus monkeys at the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He lives with his family in Berlin.

Richard L. Hindle is an assistant professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on patent innovation in landscape related technologies, from large-scale mappings of riverine and coastal systems to detailed historical studies on the antecedents of vegetated architecture. His work explores the potential of new technological narratives and material processes to reframe theory, practice, and the production of landscape. Recent works include the articles “Levees That Might Have Been” (2015), and “Infrastructures of Innovation” in Scaling Infrastructure (MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, 2016), and the exhibition Geographies of Innovation at UC Berkeley (2015).

my of Arts and Letters, New York. He has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Chicago, since 1971. Lewis’s work as composer, electronic performer, installa

Laura McLean is a curator, artist, and writer based in London. She is a graduate of Goldsmiths College and Sydney College of the Arts, where she later lectured. She has also studied at Alberta College of Art and Design, and the Universität der Künste Berlin.

Eden Medina is an associate professor of informatics and computing, affiliated associate professor of law, and adjunct associate professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research and teaching address the social, historical, and legal dimensions of our increasingly data-driven world, including the relationship of technology to human rights and free expression, the relationship between political innovation and technological innovation, and the ways that human and political values shape technological design. Medina’s writings also use science and technology as a way to broaden understandings of Latin American history and the geography of innovation. She is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (2011) and the co-editor of Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America (2014).

Anne-Sophie Milon is an artist and a freelance illustrator and animator working and living in Bristol, UK. After completing two Masters in Art, she has recently concluded the program of experimentation in Art and Politics at SciencesPo (SPEAP) in Paris.

Gerald Nestler is an artist and writer who combines theory and post-disciplinary conversation with video, installation, performance, text, code, graphics, sound, and speech. He explores what he calls the derivative condition of contemporary social relations and its paradigmatic financial models, operations, processes, narratives, and fictions. He is currently working on an “aesthetics of resolution” that maps counterfictions and counterimaginations for “renegade activism,” which revolves around the demonstration as a combined artistic, technological, social, and political practice. Nestler holds a practice-based PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

James P. M. Syvitski is Executive Director of the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS) at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 2011 to 2016, he chaired the International Council for Science’s International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), which provides essential scientific leadership and knowledge of the Earth system to help guide society toward a sustainable pathway during rapid global change. His specialty is the global flux of water and sediment (river and ocean borne) and its trends in the Anthropocene. He works at the forefront of computational geosciences, including sediment transport, land-ocean interactions, and Earth-surface dynamics.

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD program in Cultural Studies, and Co-director of the Digital Culture Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on cybernetics, information theory and computation, complexity and evolutionary theories, and the technocapitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Her books include Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004) and Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (2013). She is currently researching the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.

w York. She is also a faculty fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Ithaca. Author of numerous publications in literary studies, Italian studies, critical theory, and environmental humanities, Pinkus is also Editor of the journal Diacritics. In her latest book, Fuel (2016), Pinkus thinks about issues crucial to climate ch

afico Ruiz is Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. He studies the relationships between mediation and social space, particularly in the Arctic and subarctic; the cultural geographies of natural resource engagements; and

f International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on border security, migration, and citizenship in North America and Europe. She investigates how citizens and non-citizens engage in citizenship practices and challenge notions

SEVER was developed as a speculative design project by Francesco Sebregondi, Alexey Platonov, Inna Pokazanyeva, and Ildar Iakubov during the New Normal postgraduate program at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow. SEVER seeks to intervene into current Arctic debates by disturbing the landscape of the region’s possible futures

Lizzie Stark is an author, journalist, and experience designer. She is the author of two books, Pandora’s DNA (2014), exploring so-called ‘breast cancer genes’ and her first book, Leaving Mundania (2012), which investigates the subculture of live action role play, or larp. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, the Daily Beast, The Today Show Website, io9, Fusion, the Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere. She holds an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
She has organized numerous conventions and experiences across the US. Her most recent work is as a programming coordinator for Living Games Austin, and as co-editor and contributor for the #Feminism anthology, which collects 34 nano-games written by feminists from eleven countries.

ology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lancaster, UK. Her research interests within the field of feminist science and technology studies are focused on technological imaginaries and material practices

Jenna Sutela’s installations, texts, and sound performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Most recently, she has been exploring exceedingly complex biological and computational systems, ultimately unknowable and always becoming something new. Her work has been presented, among other places, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and her writing has been published by Fiktion, Harvard Design Magazine, and Sternberg Press.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University in the UK. Szerszynski’s work has developed across several themes, including the role of Western religious history in shaping contemporary understandings of technology and the environment—typified by his book Nature, Technology and the Sacred (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).

Elisa T. Bertuzzo studied comparative literature, sociology, communication, and media studies and holds a PhD in urban studies. She was a curator and project leader with Habitat Forum Berlin, including for the project Paradigmising Karail Basti (2010–16). Bridging discourses from the fields of cultural and urban studies, her research focuses on the everyday life facets of urbanization and settlement in South Asia. On that topic, she published Fragmented Dhaka: Analysing Everyday Life with Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of Production of Space (2009) and runs her multimedia project Archives of Movement (since 2012), which deals with the everyday life of temporary labor migrants in Bangladesh and India.

Nasrin Tabatabai is an artist who works both in Iran and the Netherlands. Since 2004, she has collaborated with Babak Afrassiabi on various joint projects and the publication of the bilingual magazine Pages (Farsi and English). Their work seeks to articulate the undecidable space between art and its historical conditions, including the recurring question of the place of the archive in defining the juncture between politics, history, and the practice of art. The artists’ work has been presented internationally in various solo and group exhibitions and they have been tutors at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2008–13), and Erg, école supérieure des arts, Brussels (2015–).

dies Institute, Geneva University, specializing in the history of Russian science and technology. She has held positions as a visiting Assistant Professor of History at NYU Shanghai and a post-doctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute, Columbia. Most broadly, she studies questions of knowledge circulation to situate Soviet developments in the global context. She is currently writing a book on science and innovation cultures in Siberia provisionally

Dr. Katerina Teaiwa is Associate Professor at the Department of Gender, Media and Cultural Studies, School of Culture, History & Language and the president of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies. Her main area of research looks at the histories of phosphate mining in the central Pacific. Her work does not only span academic research, publications, and lectures, but also manifests itself in other formats within the arts and popular culture. Her work has inspired a permanent exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, which tells the story of Pacific phosphate mining through Banaban dance. In 2015, she published „Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba“, Indiana University Press. She is currently working with visual artist Yuki Kihara on a multimedia exhibition for Carriageworks in Sydney.

record label. Her work combines a critical look at identity politics, including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity, and race, with an ongoing analysis of the socioeconomics of commercial media production. He h

Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, Founding Director of anexact office, and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, where he coordinates the Humanitarian Infrastructures Group and co-directs the PetaBencana.id disaster mapping project for the Urban Risk Lab. He is the editor of Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Tim

Asonzeh Ukah is a sociologist and historian of religion. He joined the University of Cape Town in 2013 and previously taught at the University of Bayreuth (2005–13), where he also earned a doctorate and habilitation in history of religions. His research interests include religious urbanism, the sociology of Pentecostalism, and religion and media. He is Director of the Research Institute on Christianity and Society in Africa (RICSA), University of Cape Town, and Affiliated Senior Fellow of Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS), University of Bayreuth. He is the author of A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power (2008) and Bourdieu in Africa (edited with Magnus Echtler, 2016).

Sebastian Vehlken is a media theorist and cultural historian at Leuphana University Lüneburg and Permanent Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS). From 2013 to 2017, he worked as MECS Junior Director, and in 2015–16, he was a visiting professor at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, the University of Vienna, and Leuphana. His areas of interest include the theory and history of computer simulation and digital media, the media history of swarm intelligence, and the epistemology of think tanks. His current research project, Plutonium Worlds, explores the application of computer simulations in West German fast breeder reactor programs.

Davor Vidas is a research professor in international law and Director of the Law of the Sea Programme at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Lysaker, Norway. He is Chair of the Committee on International Law and Sea Level Rise and a member of the Anthropocene Working Group. Vidas has been involved in international law research for over thirty years, focusing since 2009 on implications of the Anthropocene for the development of international law. Among his books are The World Ocean in Globalisation (2011) and Law, Technology and Science for Oceans in Globalisation (2010). He is the editor-in-chief of the book series Anthropocene (Skolska knjiga, Zagreb), launched in 2017.

Hannes Wiedemann is a Berlin-based photographer. He studied at the Ostkreuz School of Photography, Berlin. For his project Grinders (2015–16), he followed the American bodyhacking community, a small group of people across the United States working out of garages and basements to become real cyborgs. Recent exhibitions include NEW PHOTOGRAPHY II (2017) at Gallery ALAN, Istanbul, and HUMAN UPGRADE, with Susanna Hertrich (2016), at Schader-Stiftung Gallery, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt. www.hanneswiedemann.com

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English and Founding Director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University, Houston. He is the author of What Is Posthumanism? (2010), a book that weaves together principal concerns of his work: animal studies, system theory, pragmatism, and post-structuralism. It is part of the series Posthumanities, for which he serves as Founding Editor at the University of Minnesota Press. His most recent publication is Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in Biopolitical Frame (2013) and earlier books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003) and Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003).

Dr. Jan Zalasiewicz is Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester and Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. A field geologist, paleontologist, and stratigrapher, he teaches and publishes on geology and earth history, in particular on fossil ecosystems and environments that span over half a billion years of geological time.

Liv Østmo is one of the founders and current Dean of the Sámi University of Applied Sciences, Kautokeino, Norway, where she researches and lectures on the subject of multicultural understanding. For the last eight years, Østmo has worked with traditional Sámi knowledge and she is currently working on putting the finishing touches on a methodology book about the documentation of this knowledge.

Risk As Immaterial Raw Material

In this artistic formulation, Florian Goldmann makes popular risk indexes fungible, specifically their conflation of natural disaster with financial disaster. He looks at Tokyo and its complex intersection of economy, high technology, and futurity to tell a story about the seismic fault line between the insurable and the uninsurable.

Based on research by the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies, the London-based insurance market Lloyd’s City Risk Index 2015‒2025 assesses anthropogenic as well as natural threats to the economies of large cities. Tokyo was ranked as the second riskiest city in the index’s overall rating, with windstorm, market crash, and oil-price shock being the biggest potential threats to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).Lloyd’s City Risk Index 2015‒2025 (http://www.lloyds.com/cityriskindex/).

Examining risk from a systemic, finance-focused perspective, the factor of casualties presumably plays a role in regards to a lack of workforce at key production sites or the claims’ burden insurance and governments might face. Therefore, despite the effect the reviewed threats would ultimately have to the individ-ual, the ranking remains largely abstract. Earthquakes, ranked in fourth position in the Index, are an omnipresent threat in Japan and substantiate a specific culture of dealing with the risk of catastrophe.

In so-called Life Safety Learning Centers, the population is exercised to be prepared for the direct and indirect consequences of earthquakes as well as tsunami, typhoons, or volcanic activities. Perils are made tangible with representations to scale, such as miniature models, or simulations of specific scenarios. The impact of an earthquake is broken down to the human scale by reducing its trembling to the measure of a walk-in shaking table. Instructions, for what to do and when, if an earthquake is striking are given prior to entering the shaking table, which is likely designed to match a kitchen, living room, or office, including perils specific to each location.

Once the trembling stops, get up from under the table, check if the doors still open up and make sure to keep them open, as with aftershocks the frames might bend and get out of square leaving the doors blocked. Turn off the gas supply and leave the house.

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The routine exposure to preset risk scenarios is meant to generate a feeling of control and security in the face of prospective catastrophes. The simulated trembling usually reproduces historical earthquakes, creating a sensibility for site- and situation-specific circumstances. The memory of historical events is a substantial factor of preparedness. September 1, the anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 for instance, is commemorated as Disas-ter Prevention Day, with extensive preparedness training exercised nationwide. The Kanto earthquake caused more than 100,000 fatalities and the destruction, by fire, of the majority of Tokyo’s wooden houses. Museums and memorial sites, in addition to facilitating com-memoration for the victims of earthquakes, tsunami, or volcanic eruptions, often run educa-tive programs at the same time, preparing the population for likely future catastrophes.

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The prediction of catastrophes is linked to the reconstruction of historical events in much the same way as prevention and commemoration are intertwined. Earthquake prognosis is largely based on stochastic models of recurrent events. Yet, the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami had seen recalculations of the probabilities of future earthquakes, since the quake had likely altered the stress on adjacent fault lines. In 2012, the Japanese government’s estimate for a potentially devastating earthquake (magnitude 7 or higher) to happen within the next thirty years in Tokyo was 70 percent. In the same year, the Earth-quake Research Institute at Tokyo University announced the more alarming prediction of a probability of 70 percent for an earthquake of that scale to occur within the time span of just four years, and a probability of 98 percent for it to happen within the next thirty years.See Justin McCurry (in Tokyo), “Tokyo ‘has 70% chance of powerful earthquake within four years,’” The Guardian, January 23, 2012 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/23/tokyo-powerful-earthquake-four-years).

Differing approaches to modeling and localization, i.e. either based on regions or along fault lines, as well as the convenient but misleading human-scale time span, might have led to these divergent numbers.Akira Oikawa (staff writer), „Predicting earthquakes in Japan is a numbers game,” Nikkei Asian Review, August 22, 2016 (http://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Science/Predicting-earthquakes-in-Japan-is-a-numbers-game?page=1).

With either percentage rate, the threat to Tokyo and many other cities in Japan is evident. Measures to optimize infrastructure- and building regulations as well as to prepare the population in anticipation of contingent catastrophes have long been implemented and are adjusted in correspondence with the impact of recurring earthquakes, as well as tsunami, typhoons, and accidents at industrial plants caused by the former.

Each event sets new benchmarks according to which a wide array of industrial, governmental, and insurance stakeholders reassess strategies of adapting to, preventing, and mitigating future catastrophes. The simultaneity of Japan’s industrialized economy and its densely populated agglomerations, coupled with its high exposure to geophysical as well as to climatically extreme events advanced the development of specialized industries that manage such risks. Specialized firms produce emergency supply kits or safeguards for household appliances, such as adjustable tension poles, used to secure furniture from falling over during tremors. Various auxiliary industries develop safety, backup, and filter systems for industrial sites to comply with state and insurance-imposed plant safety regulations. The procedure of approving the construction of nuclear power plants ‒ as is common in most nuclear-energy producing states ‒ is paradigmatic for this: the maximum credible accident (MCA) is conceived by scientifically- and technically informed experts. For the approval of the construction and operation to be granted, the plant needs to be built in such a way that it withstands the defined worst-case scenario. In the 1960s the MCA was defined as a malfunction in the primary cooling system leading to overheating of the reactor, which could in turn lead to a core meltdown. As precaution specifically designed, emergency-cooling systems have to be installed.Joachim Radkau, “GAU: Nuclear Reactors and the ‘Maximum Credible Accident,’” Global Environment, vol. 11: RCC Special Issue on Environment and Memory (2013), pp 42‒57, here p. 50.

The MCA is adjusted according to advances in science and technology broadening the realm of what is considered credible. However, as became ever more apparent with the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant (which was triggered by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami), the risks embedded in the collision of natural phenomena and technology surpass the narrow thresholds of what was once defined as conceivable in scientific and technical terms. To confine the resulting evermore-radiating risks, more sectors of auxiliary industries have developed, mitigating the consequences of radioactive fallout to the human environment, reprocessing irradiated soil or measuring the amount of radionuclides contained in agricultural produce.

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In fact, the term, risk, as we use it today has itself been extracted from a collision of the natural and the technical. It can be traced back to the Mediterranean, or rather to twelfth-century Italian city-states, where it appeared as risicum in contracts for maritime trade ventures.Benjamin Scheller, “Risiko – Kontingenz, Semantik und Fernhandel im Mittelmeerraum des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters,” in Benjamin Scheller et al., Die Ungewissheit des Zukünftigen. Kontingenz in der Geschichte, Frank-furt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2016, p. 185.

The emergence of the new word in distinction to fortuna, denoting fortune as well as misfortune, coincided with the establishment of a distinction between investor and trader. Scheller, “Risiko – Kontingenz,,” p. 190.

The trader delivering the cargo confronted the hazards of seafaring whereas the financial risk of a potential loss, due to shipwreck or pirate capture, was committed to the investor, who stayed ashore. While hazards (fortuna) were attributed to the environment, the gods, or the sea itself, risks were attributed to decisions.Scheller, “Risiko – Kontingenz,” p. 193.

The exposure to risk is deliberately sought, whereas hazards are generally avoided. Systematically approached, hazards can become risks. Virtually concealed in uncertainty, they can be extracted and commodified. Soon merchants began trading the risks of seafaring ventures themselves, constituting the financial technique of insurance.Scheller, “Risiko – Kontingenz,” p. 196.

The minefields of hazards permeating the antagonistic oceans became the risk-mining fields of early medieval maritime trade. Today large parts of the immaterial raw material that is risk are extracted from the unforeseeable rather than the uncertain. The mining fields have diverted from the spatially contingent seas to the equally antagonistic anthropogenic environment and its contingent futures.

The impacts of catastrophes are decreasingly localizable in conventional terms as they surpass thresholds of the measurable and the foreseeable, subduing the realm of what was unimaginable and considered uninsurable previously. While industrial production is increasingly fluid and placeless, with value chains accelerating and spreading globally, the risks insured along these chains still tend to be tied to locations, in the form of property. Minimizing the amount of time a completed component is stored at its manufacturing base, sending it off to the next station of the assembly line instantly, optimizes production. So even though physical cargo of Earth material composites is still rushing along the value chains, production becomes an increasingly virtual, placeless, and intangible endeavor, perceived as flow rather than as succession of sites and operations. New vulnerabilities occur along these quasi-virtual chains, as this globalized system can potentially be paralyzed with a single cut into one of its chain links. Even though this has been posing substantial challenges to the insurance industry, it has also fostered the generation of new fields for risk harvesting. The insurance industry works with complex models to translate emerging hazards into risks. To define insured value the potential financial stress needs to be calculable. Unlike earthquake prognosis models that are exclusively stochastic extrapolations, compiling prognosis based on reconstructions of the past, the insurance sector increasingly operates with alternative methods of quantifying risk. Improbabilities, rather than probabilities, are sought after. Data on contingent events are gathered, employing expert teams composed of actuaries as well as natural and social scientists, architects, and engineers. To quantify financial liabilities resulting from catastrophes, they take into account individual risks, recordings of weather and geophysical events, knowledge about buildings, industrial circumstances, and the potential for terrorist attacks. Where empirical data is not attainable, meaning is imposed on uncertainty through non-scientific forms of knowledge that are intuitive, emotional, aesthetic, moral, and speculative.Richard Ericson and Aaron Doyle, “Catastrophe Risk, Insurance and Terrorism,” Economy and Society, vol. 33, no. 2 (2004), pp. 135‒73, here p. 138.

Expert judgment and proxies are used and the modeled results are as sensitive to these assumptions as they are to variations in input data.UNISDR, GAR 15 ‒ Making Development Sustainable: The Future of Disaster Risk Management. Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. Geneva: UNISDR, 2015, p. 57.

The developed models circumscribe, localize, and give measure to catastrophic events that would otherwise remain deemed immeasurable due to their futurity and the lack of suitable historical data.
Loss events are not avoided, but resulting financial loss is controlled and mitigated.

The flows of production and supply chains endangered by natural as well as anthropogenic hazards, e.g. a tsunami destroying a monopolistic chip supplier’s factory or aridity leading to major crop loss, are made resistant on a financial, systemic, yet virtual scale.

Hazards are converted into something that is potentially lucrative to a few, whereas the farmers suffering from the drought might not be a factor in the equation at all. The individuals directly affected by globally spreading anthropogenic risks, generated along quasi-virtual production chains, remain locally bound; remain exposed, dwelling next to hazardous industrial sites. What has been detected and quantified as a contingent risk to the production chain remains a contingent hazard to them. Risk information gathered by the insurance and corresponding catastrophe modeling industry is still largely retained as intellectual property within each company and is rarely accessible to governments, businesses, or individual households.UNISDR, GAR 15, p. 145.

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The threshold between insurable and uninsurable risks is gradually shifting towards the realm of the previously uninsurable, immeasurable. Measure is given to the de facto immeasurable by setting it in proportion to a reference point, as exemplified by the determination of the MCA for nuclear power plants. Such quantification of contingent risk is accompanied by a qualitative redefinition of what type of risk-taking can be considered “measured.” This mechanism is reflexive as the yet undefined, future risks will cancel and exceed existing norms of perception and depiction, requiring new ones to be produced concurrently. Potential new insurance holders need to be made aware of the hazards to which they might be exposed in the future, as “it’s hard to sell something to [them] if it hasn’t happened, if they don’t perceive it as a risk.”Ericson and Doyle, “Catastrophe Risk, Insurance and Terrorism,” p. 142.

Creating awareness for new risks and developing the suitable insurance products in realms previously regarded uninsurable supposedly entails trade- and techno-industrial ventures to take greater risks, which might in turn entail a demand for new insurance products. Insurance could therefore be considered a supply chain inherent to what has been termed the technosphere.

According to a belief that gained popularity in nineteenth-century Japan, earthquakes are caused by Namazu, a giant catfish that dwells beneath the archipelago. It was said that, whenever one of the gods in charge of keeping Namazu in check is distracted, devastating tremors occur. To hold Earthly phenomena, such as the wrongdoings of the ruling class, responsible for the distraction of the gods, was indeed common. To protect their houses from being destroyed, people would put up graphic reproductions of Namazu being controlled and, at times, punished for having caused previous earthquakes by the respective gods. Another popular theme of Namazu-e (lit. catfish pictures) was the depiction of representatives of the trades either those harmed by or who benefit from the consequences of earthquakes. Carpenters, for instance, were considered beneficiaries since it was up to them to rebuild the city.Gregory Smits, “Shaking up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints,” Journal of Social History, vol. 39, no. 4 (2006), pp. 13ff.

A contemporary Namazu-e might depict a giant drill hammer, surging ahead into the ocean of contingent futures. The water surface, which represents the present, ripples with the uncontrolled Namazu emerging. An insurance broker and an underwriter observe the situation from an offshore platform, applying a tape measure and taking notes.